Pushing the boundaries of Official Development Assistance challenges and opportunities

Organizer: Civil Society FfD Group (including the Women’s Working Group on FfD)

Facilitating organzations: UKAN, TUDCN-RSCD, IBON, Eurodad

When: Tuesday May 23 | 6.30-8.00 pm | CR-7

Aid is changing – from what counts to how it is measured. New development challenges and ambitious, multi-faceted development goals do mean that development finance, aid included, need to change. But this is also pushing the boundaries of the traditional understanding of what aid is and how donors spend it. Already it is clear that aid will be used in more strategic or catalytic ways with increased focused on leveraging aid to blend with private investment or to serve the dual purpose of supporting development as well as donors own national and security interests. These changes are creating new opportunities but also carry risks. This is particularly true for blended finance where the AAAA also commits to developing, in an inclusive manner, principles and standards for blending – an area that is also being developed in the OECD.

The process of redefining ODA was kicked off in the OECD Development Assistance Committee but broadened in the Addis Ababa FfD negotiations with the AAAA committing donors to ensuring that this process is both transparent and inclusive of the broadest range of development stakeholders. The ECOSOC FfD Forum in New York provides an obvious opportunity to engage the diversity of development actors in this process and deliver on that promise. This event will seek to provide a forum for all actors to engage and contribute to the modernisation of ODA with a particular focus on blended finance.